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The History of
Dee’s Enochian Tradition

So far, I have given you the very basics of the Enochian tradition, John Dee, and the magick he recorded in his journals. You should now be generally familiar with certain terms—such as Heptarchia, Gebofal, Great Table, Watchtower, and Part of the Earth—that were once mysterious. In this chapter, we will explore a general historical overview of Dee’s Enochian tradition.

I will begin with some thoughts about Dee’s own intentions and motivations behind recording the Enochian material. The discussion will briefly touch upon subjects such as Jewish and Christian mysticism. Next, I will explore the development of the Enochian tradition after Dee’s passing, starting with a brief summary of how the journals escaped from Dee’s hiding places into the hands of later occultists. Then I will trace the Enochian influence through the scholar-philosophers of the Royal Society of England, the Adepts of the Golden Dawn, and on into the occultism of the twentieth century. This will illustrate how drastically Dee’s material was altered by those who followed him—occultists who rarely had access to all of Dee’s journals and largely misunderstood what they could find. This resulted in an entirely new Enochian tradition, which I have called “neo-Enochian” in previous writings.

The Enochian Magick of
Dr. John Dee (or “Dee Purism”)

It is important to consider the work of Dee and Kelley within the context of the Renaissance world in which they lived—where Protestantism was diluting the previously unchallenged authority of the Catholic Church, where the Church of England was still young and endangered, where Britain was on the verge of empire and the New World was newly discovered. Dee’s magick appears very different through this lens than it would look much later, after passing through the Age of Enlightenment and magickal groups like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This study of the original version of Dee’s magick—as recorded by the man himself—is today called “Dee purism.”

All too often, Dee purism is mistaken to mean that only Dee’s own writings are important to the study of Enochian magick. Nothing could be further from the truth! Dee himself studied several mystical traditions, such as the Hebrew Qabalah and Merkavah mysticism, the Christian Qabalah, Gnosticism, and even the Solomonic grimoires. (We will explore these further below.) All of these show their mark upon Dee’s personal system of angel magick and are therefore an important part of the Dee-purist study of Enochiana.

When we compare Dee’s magick to his source material, we begin to get an idea of his unspoken intentions. The first phase of his system—the Heptarchia—appears to be his own version of the magick found in the Solomonic grimoires. Precursors to the Heptarchia (and other phases of the Enochian system) can be found in texts such as Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Arbatel of Magic, Liber Juratis, The Heptameron, Lemegeton (especially the Pauline Arts and the Almadel of Solomon), and many more. Like many of these texts, Dee’s Heptarchia is a system of planetary angel magick intended to gain the attentions of the seven entities who constructed and currently maintain the universe.

One of the grimoires in particular contains an essential occult primer for anyone who wishes to attempt a Heptarchic working: the forty-nine magical aphorisms found in the Arbatel of Magic. These aphorisms outline both an occult philosophy and a cosmology that seem to provide the foundation upon which the Heptarchic magick is built.

The second phase of Dee’s system—including Gebofal and the Book of Loagaeth—appears to be greatly influenced by Jewish mystical practices such as “Counting the Omer” and Merkavah mysticism. Counting the Omer is an observance that spans the fifty days between Passover and Shavuot. During this time, the Jewish mystic could engage in the practice of “Entering the Fifty Gates of Understanding (or Binah).” This involved daily meditations upon different aspects of God as recorded in the Torah. Each meditation leads the aspirant closer to the Divine and should ultimately open a channel of direct communication from God to human.25 This would appear to be the inspiration behind the forty-nine- day practice of Gebofal, during which a different table from the Book of Loagaeth is meditated upon each day until it culminates upon the final day in direct divine revelation.

The Ma’aseh Merkavah (“work of the Chariot”) was an early form of Jewish shamanism that existed alongside the Ma’aseh Berashith (“work of Creation”). In the study of Berashith, the mystic would pray and contemplate the manner in which God created the universe and how the soul became incarnate in flesh. In the study of Merkavah, the aspirant would perform techniques to generate visions of the throne of God (called the Merkavah, or divine chariot) and the seven circles of heaven. This carried over into early Christianity as well, as we can see especially in chapter four of the Revelation of St. John.

Later, in about the thirteenth century, both Ma’aseh Berashith and Ma’aseh Merkavah would become vital foundations for the Jewish Qabalah (as well as the rest of the Western Mystery Tradition). Aspects of Merkavah mysticism run throughout Dee’s system of angel magick, especially in the Loagaeth system, which promises that one can enter the forty-eight gates of heaven and explore the realms beyond.

The third phase of Dee’s magick is broken into two aspects: the Parts of the Earth and the Great Table of the Earth. The parts system appears to be drawn from Agrippa’s work 26 (with some reference to Merkavah mysticism), while the Great Table of the Earth appears to be a diagram of the Merkavah (throne of God) itself and has a largely alchemical focus.27

Even Dee’s Angelical language did not arise in a complete vacuum. Long before he penned his journals, scholars and mystics had been searching for the “primordial tongue”—that is, the first human language, supposedly spoken in Eden. Other famous mages (such as Trithemius and Agrippa) had already attempted to create some form of this language. However, they usually produced a version of Hebrew written with obscure “Hebrewesque” characters. Dee was one of the first (perhaps the very first) mystics to record a truly unique celestial language with its own grammar, syntax, alphabet, and so on.28

Finally, there is a heavy Gnostic influence underlying most of Dee’s system. Gnosticism is a mystical religion that arose around the dawn of the Common Era in the area of Egypt. It drew much from the ancient Egyptian and Greek philosophies that were common to that area at the time. It arose independently of Christianity, but after a couple of centuries it had become closely associated with early mystical Christian sects. (A Gnostic text even became one of the four biblical Gospels: the book of John.) This perhaps reached its peak when a man named Valentinus (100–160 CE) formed a Gnostic sect within the Catholic Church.

This and other Gnostic sects had been all but abolished by the time Dee came along. However, their mysteries—especially those of the Valentinian sect—had long since become foundational to the Western Esoteric Tradition. Traces of Gnostic doctrine can be found within the Hebrew Qabalah, alchemy, Hermeticism, the Solomonic grimoires, etc. In Dee’s system, the Gnostic influence is most obvious in the poetical imagery of the forty-eight Angelical Callings.29

Taken all together, it would appear Dee wished to formulate his own Christianized versions of the most powerful occult systems he had encountered. This makes perfect sense when we consider that the Christian Qabalah was newly born and gathering steam during Dee’s era. The Christian Qabalah (often spelled Kabbalah or Cabala as well as other variations) is a mixture of Christian, Jewish, and Hermetic mysticism.

One of the first Christian Qabalists, Pica Della Mirandola, had lived in Italy in the late 1400s, about one hundred years before Dee’s journals were written. Another famous Christian Qabalist, Johann Reuchlin, lived in Germany during the late 1400s and early 1500s, passing away just a few years before Dee’s birth in 1527. Therefore, Dee stood in a good position to add his name to the list of great Western Christian Qabalists. Had the kings and emperors who glimpsed Dee’s journals understood the significance of what they saw, he would have achieved his goal, and his name would now be spoken alongside Mirandola’s, Reuchlin’s, and those who followed them.

However, that dream was never fulfilled. Too many powerful people were suspicious of Dee’s angelic revelations. Remember, this was a time when anything that smacked of occultism or that attempted to contradict religious authority could get you arrested and tortured to death. Besides which, kings and rulers do not generally take kindly to would-be prophets who insist on issuing commandments from God. Thus, instead of being hailed as an accomplished philosopher, Dee found himself hastily leaving several towns in the dead of night. Kelley (whose aggressive personality made him few friends) would escape with Dee on several occasions until he finally found a home with Emperor Rudolph and left Dee’s employ.

Dee would eventually return to England in 1589, where he would spend his remaining years seeking fair compensation for all he had offered his queen and country, including his skills as a navigator, cartographer, mathemetician, physician, astrologer, philosopher, cryptographer, and perhaps even intelligencer. In this quest he would meet with some successes and quite a few defeats. Complicating matters was Dee’s growing infamy as a “sorcerer” and consorter with “devils,” which caused him to spend a portion of his spare time defending his reputation.

In the end, Dee hid his magickal journals away. His personal grimoire (compiled from information recorded in the journals) and the first five journals (containing the Heptarchia and a portion of Loagaeth) were secreted in the false bottom of a cedar chest. They would remain hidden there for over fifty years, and it would be nearly four hundred years before the magickal systems recorded in them would be seriously studied by Western occultists.

The remaining journals appear to have remained hidden on Dee’s property. About ten years after Dee’s passing, the land was purchased by Robert Cotton, who claimed he found the journals buried there. Later, Cotton’s son would give these journals to Méric Casaubon, who published them in 1659 as A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years between Dr. John Dee (A Mathematician of Great Fame in Q. Eliz. and King James their Reignes) and Some Spirits. This publication, especially Casaubon’s introduction to the material, was quite sensational for the time. Casaubon described Dee as a naive fool who was duped by devils posing as angels—a characterization that would haunt Dee’s memory until the latter parts of the twentieth century.

Today there is a marked increase in both scholarship about Dee and Kelley and in the practical application of the magickal systems they recorded. This new movement has led to the Dee-purist practice of Enochian magick, seen for the first time in over four centuries.

Of course, if Dee’s magickal system was largely unknown and unused until the past couple of decades, then how did Enochian magick become foundational to the Western Mystery Tradition in the meantime? Let us continue the saga in the next section:

The Neo-Enochian Tradition

As discussed in the previous section, Dee did not become famous as a co-founder of the Christian Qabalistic tradition. After his passing, few people knew of the existence of the journals, and absolutely no one attempted to carry on his work. Much of the material important to working the system was hidden in the cedar chest, and Casaubon would not publish A True and Faithful Relation for nearly half a century.

Dee had, however, died with the reputation of a conjurer, and this would provide the perfect audience for Casaubon’s later publication. The world wanted to know what Dee and Kelley had been up to behind the closed doors of their study. Like tabloid readers today, they wanted dirt and drama—and Casaubon was more than happy to provide them with both. In his introduction, he described Dee as a poor zealot who was fooled by a bunch of “devils” and a con artist (Kelley). Casaubon’s take on the story became accepted as fact, and no scholar would challenge that view for nearly four hundred years.

Thankfully, some people were nonetheless interested in Dee’s actual magickal work. The Age of Enlightenment was just getting underway, and Western culture was shifting its focus from religion to science. Several members of the Royal Society (a late seventeenth-century English organization of Enlightenment scholars, scientists, and philosophers) took Dee’s journals seriously and began to experiment with his material.

Of course, since most of Dee’s system was still hidden away, what these scholars found in Casaubon’s book was a very intriguing yet incomplete system. It led to the (mistaken) idea that Dee had only recorded a skeletal outline of a system, and that it needed “fleshing out” with outside material to make it workable. Thus, occultists began to incorporate Dee’s material (such as the Watchtowers, the Holy Table, and the forty-eight Angelical Callings) into their own established magickal traditions. This resulted in something entirely new and different from what Dee had intended—and I call it “neo-Enochiana.”

This was the era of men like Elias Ashmole—a founding member of the Royal Society—who is rumored to be among the philosophers who experimented with summoning Dee’s angels. (This is by no means confirmed.) It was also the period during which the mysterious “Dr. Rudd” comes into the picture (see below). Other major contributors to the neo-Enochian current would come along later, such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley.

Rudd Enochiana

Legend has it that Dr. Rudd knew Dee personally and directly inherited his system of angel magick. This would mean that Rudd’s Enochian material—published in A Treatise on Angel Magic—should represent the final form of Dee’s system as the man himself would have used it. It would reflect what Dee and Rudd worked on together, and it is said that Rudd led his own English mystery school, continuing a secret tradition of Enochian magick descended directly from Dee.

Sadly, this legend does not stand up to the facts. First of all, the Enochian material found in Rudd’s treatise shows no familiarity with Dee’s entire system. It includes only the portions published by Méric Casaubon, which only includes about a third of the system. Many of the mysteries associated with the Enochian material were recorded in the journals Casaubon did not have, and Rudd’s treatise makes no reference to them whatsoever.

All of this means the Treatise on Angel Magic was most likely written after Casaubon published his book in 1659. And since the Thomas Rudd of historical record passed away three years earlier (1656), it is quite unlikely that he wrote the treatise. Plus, there is no proof that Thomas Rudd knew John Dee. It would appear the treatise was written by someone long after Dee passed away, and Dr. Rudd’s name was simply used to give the manuscript occult authority.

For these reasons, I consider “Rudd’s” material to be the first example of neo-Enochiana. Rudd did what hundreds of neo-Enochian practitioners after him would do: he picked and chose interesting bits of information from A True and Faithful Relation and incorporated them into the magickal system he was already using. Rudd stands out in this regard because he published before the existence of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, so you won’t find any GD elements in his neo-Enochian material.

Rudd focuses primarily upon the construction and use of the skrying table, which Casaubon had illustrated near the front of A True and Faithful Relation. Ironically, this was perhaps closer to Dee’s original intent than later neo-Enochian systems would come. Rudd did not seem interested in the Watchtowers, Parts of the Earth, the thirty Aethyrs, or (oddly enough) the forty-eight Angelical Callings, likely because he was already well-versed in his own systems of angel summoning (as outlined in the rest of the treatise). He might have been more interested in the Heptarchic system if that material been included in A True and Faithful Relation. I would find it hard to believe Rudd could have known about the Heptarchia and not mentioned it in his own analysis of the Holy Table and Seven Ensigns, both of which are inherent to Dee’s Heptarchic system.

Book H

The next important neo-Enochian document to appear was entitled Book H, or Clavicula Tabularum Enochi. In fact, I would say that Book H is the single most important source document for the neo-Enochian tradition because it would later become the foundation of the Golden Dawn’s Enochian system.

Book H focuses entirely upon the Great Table system of angel magick as drawn from Méric Casaubon’s publication of Dee’s later journals. It contains all of the information recorded by Dee—including the Great Table initiation rite, the functions of the Watchtower angels, and the methods for decrypting their names from the Great Table. Then it considerably expands upon those instructions, seeking to present a fully functional grimoire for the use of the Watchtowers. There are dozens of original prayers and invocations, and the method of extracting the angels’ names is altered, thus creating an entirely new hierarchy of spiritual beings that never appear in Dee’s records.

There is also a difference in how the author of Book H attributed the Watchtowers to the four quarters of the world. As discussed in chapter 2, Dee was told to use the Watchtower associated with the world civilization he wished to influence (Eastern nations, Western nations, etc.). However, Book H has changed this so that each Watchtower represents a direction of the compass, with the center point of the world established where the aspirant happens to be working. (This would later have a massive impact on the Golden Dawn system of magick, as well as the systems that followed afterward, from Thelema to Wicca.)

The most significant difference between Book H and Dee’s system is that Book H uses the Reformed Table of Raphael rather than the original Great Table. It would appear that the unknown author of the document had read Casaubon’s A True and Faithful Relation and found the Reformed Table with Dee’s notes in the margin. He read how Dee rejoiced that the Reformed Table solved “a great doubt” and assumed that meant the new version should simply replace the original. (Had the Victorian author known the Reformed Table was associated with the infamous wife-swapping incident, he likely would not have used it.)

This version of the Great Table forms the frontispiece to Book H. It is drawn so that the higher divine names on the table are in black ink while most of the angel names are in red.

Book H then provides several quotes from A True and Faithful Relation that outline the sacred mythos behind the magick—especially the transgression and fall of Adam and God’s establishment of four great overseers to protect humanity from Satan’s attacks. This is followed by an outline of “The Hierarchy of Angels” (that is, within the Watchtowers) that is adapted from descriptions of Edward Kelley’s first vision of the Watchtower angels.

Next, it presents exhaustive and highly repetitive instructions for decrypting the names of God and the angels from each Watchtower. This is followed by an outline of the functions of each group of angels in the Watchtowers—which mirrors Dee’s original version exactly.

The next section contains the instructions for the Great Table initiation ritual, which are largely unchanged from Dee’s instructions. It mainly concerns the construction and use of a book containing prayers and invocations for all the names upon the Great Table. A white robe that will be used only once is also mentioned.

The final three sections provide lengthy invocations to the Watchtower angels: the first and third sections seem to contain actual conjurations intended to compel the angels to appear and speak. The second section includes “invocations by way of humble supplication” to all the same angels. The prayers in this second section are not outright conjurations. Instead, they appear to be the invitational prayers that should be written in the special book and used during the Great Table initiation rite.30

We do not know exactly when Book H was written, nor who authored it. I have heard speculation that it was written by someone involved with the founding of the Golden Dawn, such as W. Wynn Westcott. If so, that would make it a late nineteenth-century text. In the end, however, we simply do not know the true origin of Book H. We can only be certain that it was written sometime between the publication of A True and Faithful Relation and the establishment of the Golden Dawn in the very late 1800s—a window of two centuries. We know that it could not have been written by Dee or anyone who had seen the journals or grimoire hidden in the cedar chest, because Book H contains absolutely no references to information found in those books.31

It is most likely that someone sat down in the British Museum with a copy of A True and Faithful Relation and did their best to mine the dense tome for useful magickal information. Because they did not know about Dee’s hidden journals, they saw in Dee’s records (as “Rudd” had seen) some interesting but incomplete ideas about angel magick. Book H was this person’s attempt to create a complete system for working with the angels of the Great Table.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and The Book of the Concourse of the Forces

After Book H, the next major contribution to the neo-Enochian tradition came from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the late 1800s. This contribution is contained in one of their inner-Order documents entitled The Book of the Concourse of the Forces. This document outlines, in exhaustive detail, the Golden Dawn’s unique system of Enochian magick as taught in their Adept grades. It focuses entirely upon the Reformed Table of Raphael, apparently drawn from Book H itself. There is nothing of the Heptarchia or Gebofal in the Golden Dawn’s original system of neo-Enochiana because those parts of Dee’s system were still largely unknown.

Meanwhile, The Book of the Concourse of the Forces incorporates nearly every scrap of occult symbolism and correspondences taught throughout the rest of the Order’s curriculum. Thus we find information here about geomancy, tarot, astrology, the Qabalistic Tree of Life, Coptic-Egyptian godforms, and (of course!) a central focus upon the four philosophical elements—Fire, Water, Air, and Earth. The Great Table became a symbolic compendium of the entire Golden Dawn cosmology.32

The most accessible source for The Book of the Concourse of the Forces is probably The Golden Dawn (Book Nine) by Israel Regardie. Additional Golden Dawn Enochian material can also be found in Regardie’s later publication The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic. Plus, if you search the Internet for “Concourse of the Forces,” you will discover that some of the material—along with commentary about it—is available for free viewing or download. Here I will simply give a brief overview of the contents of the book as presented in Regardie’s Golden Dawn.

First, Regardie wrote his own introduction to the Enochian system as a preface to the older Golden Dawn text. This was one of my first introductions to the system, and I dare say the same is true for most Enochian scholars and practitioners today (even those who eventually turned toward the Dee-purist system instead). Sadly, this introduction is overflowing with inaccuracies and outright mythologies that have been repeated over and over again by students and authors ever since its publication.

For example, have you ever heard that the Enochian language and system of magick are remnants of the primordial religion of Atlantis? Or that bits and pieces of the language have been found in ancient—pre-Sanskrit—words and phrases? This introduction is the primary source for that myth as popularized in modern texts. Somewhat less outlandish (yet still incorrect) is the assertion that Dee and Kelley merely presented a skeletal framework for a magickal system that was never completed, and was therefore unworkable. The Golden Dawn, claims Regardie, took that skeleton and gave it flesh, transforming it into a fully formed system of ceremonial magick and the crown jewel of the Golden Dawn’s curriculum. Regardie also states that the origins of the system are largely unknown, basically dismissing the work of Dee and Kelley as merely recovering a few bits of an older system (perhaps from subconscious memories of past lives).

All of this we now know to be untrue—and we are well aware of the origins of the system through Dee and Kelley, as well as their source materials. We also know that Dee and Kelley recorded an elaborate and quite complete system of angel magick without need of inclusions from other traditions to make it “workable.” However, keep in mind that these inaccuracies are not Regardie’s fault, as he was merely presenting what he himself had been taught, and he did not have access to the wealth of historical material we now enjoy about Dee, Kelley, and the system of magick they recorded. It is unfortunate, though, that so many modern authors on the subject of Enochiana have parroted portions of Regardie’s introduction as if they were fact.

After this introduction, Regardie presents the proper Book of the Concourse of the Forces, which is divided into four parts:

Part One

The first part begins by presenting the four Watchtower tablets and a Table of Union 33 drawn from Book H. However, they are never presented together as a unified Great Table. The Golden Dawn prefers to keep the Watchtowers separated in the four quarters of the universe, as well as the four quarters of their hall, with the Table of Union residing in the center upon the altar.

These Watchtowers are directly attributed to the four elements (and the Table of Union to Spirit)—which was not seen in either Dee’s work or even Book H. This is the first time in history where it was considered that the Eastern Watchtower contained Air angels, the Southern Watchtower contained Fire angels, the Western Watchtower contained Water angels, and the Northern Watchtower contained Earth angels. The functions of the angels in each Watchtower—recorded by Dee and preserved in Book H—are not entirely missing from this document, but they are buried within it as a side comment. The main focus has instead shifted to the Golden Dawn’s elemental correspondences.

Also, the Golden Dawn’s original versions of the Watchtowers had many cells containing more than one letter. This arose from the Order’s early adepts’ uncertainty about what they were seeing in A True and Faithful Relation. So you will often find a cell occupied by several similarly shaped letters: “u” and “v,” or “v” and “y,” or even “u” and “a.” In other cases, you will find letters from the original Great Table mixed in with those from the Reformed Great Table where they differed. I suspect the Order never intended for these cells to actually contain more than one letter, but they wanted to present every possibility in places where they were unsure. (The modern incarnations of the Golden Dawn, having better access to Dee’s material, have dispensed with the multilettered squares entirely. This is what I have illustrated in this book as well.)

This first part of the book also outlines the elemental color schemes applied by the Order to the Watchtowers. Originally only black and red lettering on a white background (as seen in Book H) was presented to the candidate as he worked his way up the grades of the Outer Order. Upon reaching the Adept grades, he would learn the secret color scales used within the Inner Order and see for the first time the Watchtowers in vibrant color. Today the modern incarnations of the Order tend to utilize the full-color versions even in the Outer Order, though the occult meaning of the colors is reserved for the Inner grades.34

Next we are given detailed instructions for decrypting the divine and angelic names from the Watchtowers, again drawn largely from the methods outlined in Book H along with several inclusions of Golden Dawn attributions. This is where the central name of God in each Watchtower is demoted to the status of an “angelic king” and attributed to the sun, while the six elders (now called “seniors”) are associated with the remaining six planets. These planetary attributions appear nowhere previous to this document.

After these names taken from the central Great Cross of each Watchtower are outlined, the book turns its attention to the four subdivisions of each tablet. Again, the original functions of the angels in these subquadrants have been replaced with elemental correspondences. They are presented as four sub-elements: so, for example, the Watchtower of Air in the east contains Air of Air, Fire of Air, Water of Air, and Earth of Air.

This is all then associated with the Golden Dawn’s attributions of the Tetragrammaton (YHVH, the highest Hebrew name of God) to the four classical elements. Each letter of this divine name is assigned to one of the Watchtowers, its subquadrants, and even to each individual cell in the table. This gives the Watchtowers several layers of interlocking elemental symbolism, which then extends to tarot, astrological, geomantic, and other correspondences for each cell as well.

By now it should be obvious just how deep and complex this system of correspondence became and perhaps why the adepts of the Golden Dawn felt they had created (or discovered) something that went beyond what Dee had recorded. And the above merely scratches the surface of the possible correspondences! There is certainly nothing inherently wrong with this system, though Dee purists (and those who make use of the original Great Table over that of the Reformed Great Table of Raphael) may take issue with the particular arrangement of elements and astrology in this scheme.

As for the Golden Dawn, they created an interesting manner of working with this complex system in a practical manner. As you may or may not know, the symbol of the truncated pyramid (a four-sided Egyptian pyramid that appears unfinished because it has a flat top rather than coming to a proper point) is quite sacred within Masonic lodges, which is where the Golden Dawn was, quite literally, born. If you are unaware of the symbol of the truncated pyramid, simply take out a dollar bill and look on the back. You will see such a pyramid preserved there, with the all-seeing Eye of God enthroned at its summit.

Figure 6: The Pyramid and the All-Seeing Eye

The Golden Dawn made use of this symbol in relation to each and every cell of each and every Watchtower. Upon the summit of the pyramid was written the letter from the Watchtower cell, most often transliterated into the Angelical character for that letter. Within the four sides were written the various correspondences for the cell as figured by the above-explained system. Thus, such a pyramid would display symbols for the element(s), tarot card, zodiac sign, planetary symbol, Hebrew letter, and geomantic symbol, all colored according to the Inner Order’s color schemes. As you might imagine, this created very intricate and beautiful talismanic images.

Part one of the Concourse of the Forces actually goes on for several more pages, covering everything from the Golden Dawn’s peculiar system for pronouncing Angelical names to their own take on the four seals of the Watchtowers as recorded by Dee and reinterpreted through Golden Dawn symbolism and even some rather disjointed information about the Seal of the True God. For brevity’s sake, however, I will pass over these subjects here.

Part Two

The second part of the Concourse of the Forces is much shorter and less complex, mainly because it focuses entirely on the practical application of the above system. It is written in two distinct halves. The first half outlines the specific Golden Dawn hierarchies the Order associated with each cell of the Watchtowers. The second half describes the ceremonies used to invoke them.

First, it explains how to construct a semi-Egyptian figure called a sphinx, based upon the elemental associations of the square’s pyramid and the Order’s methods of talismanic imaging (constructing the image of a god or angel based upon its occult correspondences). Because the Order associated the four elements with the four biblical kherubim—the lion, eagle, man, and bull described in the first chapter of Ezekiel and the fourth chapter of the Revelation of St. John—it was possible to relate those same biblical figures to the different sides of the pyramids. By taking the head of one kherub, the body of another, the legs of another, etc., a composite sphinxlike figure could be created for every cell of the Watchtowers.

Besides the sphinx, this part of the text also outlines a set of deities—which it calls Egyptian but which are, in fact, Coptic-Egyptian—that are associated with the pyramids. Like the sphinxes, the god associated with any given cell of the Watchtowers is determined by the pyramid’s elemental correspondences. For example, if all four elements are equally divided among the sides, then the god Osiris is the deity of the cell. If Water is the dominant element, then Isis is the associated deity. The text gives a list of fifteen Coptic-Egyptian gods and which combination of elements determines the rulership of each.

The rest of this part of the Concourse of the Forces is dedicated to outlining the ritual methods of invoking and working with the hierarchies of the Watchtower squares. (This will all be covered in more detail in part two, the neo-Enochian section of this grimoire.)

This part of the text ends with several examples of skryings based upon the above pattern, given as examples of how the system should work in practice. It also mentions the original functions of the Watchtower angels as recorded by Dee and preserved in Book H. However, as I stated previously, they are given only as a kind of afterthought and have been overlooked by the greater majority of Golden Dawn adepts and neo-Enochian authors.

Part Three

The third part of the Concourse of the Forces outlines the Golden Dawn’s method of using the forty-eight Angelical Callings. If you have read my Angelical Language, Volume I, you are aware of what Dee himself recorded about the calls and how to use them. They were presented by the angels as keys to unlock the forty-eight gates of heaven represented by the tables of the Book of Loagaeth. That holy book and the calls were used in a forty-nine-day initiation ritual the angels called Gebofal.

However, most of the information about the Book of Loagaeth is contained in John Dee’s Five Books of Mystery,35 while the calls themselves are found later in the journals and preserved in A True and Faithful Relation. The early Golden Dawn adepts had ready access to the later records but were largely unaware of the contents of the Five Books. They did not know about the Book of Loagaeth nor about Gebofal. Instead, they had found the Watchtowers, the forty-eight Angelical Callings, and the Parts of the Earth, all presented outside of their proper context and without much in the way of explanation. (It is no wonder, then, why they assumed Dee’s system was incomplete.)

Because of this, the early Golden Dawn adepts developed their own method of using the forty-eight calls. They applied them as keys to unlock the various portions of the Watchtowers—including the Table of Union—and to access the Parts of the Earth. (They were correct about the Parts of the Earth, because that system is contained in A True and Faithful Relation.) Along with the use of the Reformed Great Table of Raphael and the association of the four elements to the Watchtowers, this application of the forty-eight callings to the Watchtowers is a hallmark of the neo-Enochian tradition (as opposed to Dee purism).

Dee purists entirely reject this manner of using the forty-eight Angelical Callings. On the other hand, those who defend the Golden Dawn’s methods have pointed out that the Great Table of the Earth is formed from the names of the Parts of the Earth, and the Parts of the Earth are associated with the final thirty tables of the Book of Loagaeth. Thus, there is a direct line of descent from Loagaeth to the Great Table, and thus the callings should be used to invoke the angels of the Watchtowers. I am not here to settle this debate, only to provide you with both sides of the story. There is no arguing against the fact that both systems are firmly established within their own traditions.

Later in this book, I will outline exactly how the calls are used in the Golden Dawn’s Watchtower magick. For now, let us move on to the fourth and final portion of the Concourse of the Forces.

Part Four

The final section concerns an obscure Golden Dawn form of divination called either Enochian chess or Rosicrucian chess. Entire books can be filled with the history behind this game, the rules for its play, and the manner of using it for divination or magick. However, all of that is beyond this introductory material, so I will not go into much detail here.

I will, however, discuss how this game is related to the greater system of Golden Dawn Enochiana. Every scrap of information outlined in the previous three parts of the Concourse is brought together in the construction of the chessboards, movable pieces, game play, and the manner of interpreting the result of the divination.

There are four boards, one for every element and related to the corresponding suit of the tarot. Thus, for example, if one is performing a divination for a question involving passion or aggression, the board of Fire would be used. If the question is about happiness and creativity, the board of Water would be used. If the question is about strife or sickness, the board of Air would be most appropriate. And for questions of home, job, family, etc., the board of Earth should be chosen.

Each board contains sixty-four squares, just like a regular chessboard. However, these squares are equated with the cells of the four Watchtowers, not including the Great Crosses, the Calvary Crosses, or the four cells found above each Calvary Cross. That leaves only the sixteen cells found beneath the arms of each Calvary Cross, which the Golden Dawn calls “servient squares” and recognizes as the forces closest to the physical world. Each square is colored according to the elemental associations I described previously in the construction of truncated pyramids. The only difference is that the pyramids on the Enochian chessboards are not truncated but appear to come to a definite point.

The chess pieces are those of the Order’s Coptic godforms: Osiris (= the king), Isis (= the queen), Nephthys (= the rook), Horus (= the knight), and Aroueris (aka Horus the Elder = the bishop). There are also four pawns that take the forms of the four sons of Horus described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead and in the Order’s temple symbolism. All of these pieces are colored according to the elemental symbolism of the board one is using for the game. There must be four sets of them on the board, for a total of thirty-six pieces. They represent the divine forces moving upon the elemental foundations of the world.

The game is played by four players, each moving one set of the above godform chess pieces. Each player begins with his pieces on one of the four sub-elemental quadrants of the board and moves outward from there. How each piece is allowed to move, the direction in which the player moves them, and how the pieces interact with one another during game play determines the nature of the divination. It indicates which occult forces will oppose, dominate, or support the other occult forces active in any given situation. The element that “wins” the game, along with how the game was won, will determine the outcome of the question.

The Book of the Concourse of the Forces was not the only Golden Dawn–based Enochian document, so let us now take a look at another important text that has influenced the neo-Enochian tradition.

Liber Vel Chanokh 36

At this point, mention must be made of Aleister Crowley and the role he has played in the establishment of the neo-Enochian tradition. Crowley was a member of the original Golden Dawn for a time, and it was from them he received his basic magickal instruction. He eventually left the Order on less than pleasant terms and developed his own unique system of mysticism called Thelema (Greek for “true will”). However, it always bore the unmistakable mark of the Golden Dawn, and this is certainly true of his Enochian work as well.

One of his most important neo-Enochian contributions is a document entitled Liber Vel Chanokh (“book of Enoch”), or A Brief Abstract of the Symbolic Representation of the Universe Derived by Doctor John Dee Through the Skrying of Sir Edward Kelley. The text is part of a long catalog of documents he wrote for his students, this one numbered LXXXIV (eighty-four).

Most of the Enochiana contained in the document is similar to what was explained in the Concourse of the Forces. The basic Golden Dawn correspondences are all here, using the Reformed Great Table of Raphael. Interestingly, Crowley has restored the Watchtowers into the Great Table of the Earth form, complete with the Black Cross joining them together.

Later, Crowley provides full diagrams of the individual Watchtowers with every single cell in truncated pyramid form, including the elemental or astrological symbols on each side of every pyramid. This also includes the Table of Union, proving that Crowley felt both this and the Black Cross arrangement of these letters were equally significant.

He then goes on to explain the basic Golden Dawn method of decrypting the divine and angelic names from the Watchtowers, a list of the thirty Aethyrs and their ninety-one Parts of the Earth, and the manner of applying the forty-eight Callings to the Watchtowers.

For me, there are two things that make this document stand out from previous Golden Dawn neo-Enochiana. First, Crowley begins the document with diagrams of the Holy Table and the Seal of the True God, followed by an analysis of the divine and angelic names found upon the seal. He also makes a brief mention of the Heptarchic system and the Book of Loagaeth (promising more about them in a future publication that never came). That and his listing of the thirty Aethyrs and the ninety-one parts (including a map of the parts’ names upon the Great Table) make me suspect that Crowley had studied Dee’s personal grimoire, which the author of the Concourse of the Forces does not seem to have done. However, he makes no mention of Gebofal or the proper application of the forty-eight Callings to the tables of Loagaeth, so I am fairly certain he did not study—or did not study very deeply—Dee’s original Five Books of Mystery.

The second thing that stands out about Liber Vel Chanokh is the fact that Crowley published this material to a wider audience, where the Golden Dawn’s documents would not see publication until Israel Regardie did so in the mid-1900s. Crowley released Liber Vel Chanokh (under the longer title: A Brief Abstract...) in two issues of his Equinox magazine: volume 1, numbers 7 and 8, in the year 1912. Because of this, Liber Vel Chanokh was, for some time, one of the standard neo-Enochian documents available to Western students.

The Vision and the Voice

Finally, this historical overview of neo-Enochian documents would not be complete without a mention of Crowley’s later publication of The Vision and the Voice. This book is essentially a record of Crowley’s astral travels through the thirty Aethyrs, and it presents many of the central tenets of his system of Thelema. He and his students, to this very day, consider this book to be one of his most important works, second only to his Book of the Law, the primary Thelemic holy book. (You might say that if the Book of the Law were Thelema’s Torah, then The Vision and the Voice would be Thelema’s Talmud.)

While it is true that Crowley did not seem to relate the Aethyrs to the tables of Loagaeth or the Angelical Callings, he was still closer to the mark than most by simply understanding that the Aethyrs could be spiritually entered and explored as a kind of initiation. (Though I should point out that he entered the lowest Aethyr first and moved upward, which is backward from the Gebofal system recorded by Dee.) What he found there was geared toward his own Thelemic material, and I doubt non-Thelemites will experience anything close to the same visions. Thus I will not take space here to outline what Crowley saw or what his angelic contacts told him.

Since these publications, an abundance of material has been published concerning both the Dee-purist and the neo-Enochian traditions. Some of it has been good, and much of it—sadly—has been full of errors and misconceptions mostly parroted from earlier sources. I am happy to say, however, that this is changing today. Golden Dawners and Thelemites are finally becoming aware of Dee’s original journals, and Dee purists are (in some cases) more willing to view neo-Enochiana as a legitimate tradition in its own right.

Some practitioners choose to view the two systems as entirely unrelated, while others (mostly on the neo-Enochian side) have begun to mix the two to various degrees. What is important is that the student understand that there are two distinct traditions at work here and how each of them developed independently. Only then will it be possible to judge the material—especially where the two traditions conflict—and make informed decisions on how, or if, one should import aspects of one tradition into the other.